Ben from Triplebyte here, I'm the engineer who built this tool from our offer data.
The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole. One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries - we recently discussed this with Bryan Caplan over on our blog (https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview). I'm self-taught and don't have a CS degree, but I do have a college degree which still opens doors. I'd be curious to hear from other developers without a formal background on this.
Boot-camp grads average $19k less - but $130k is still quite a bit higher than I've seen bootcamps advertising. Could this be indicating that they're at a disadvantage in the normal hiring process just for signaling reasons?
> The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole.
The sample set of people using TripleByte is not going to be remotely representative of the market for developers as a whole. Candidates with stronger resumes are not going to be using third party recruiters to spray their resume around; they are going to be applying directly to the companies they want to work at or getting headhunted by the companies themselves.
I suspect the boot camp thing is signaling. We don't quite know what to expect from boot camps yet.
I'm a high school drop out with no diploma. It's never come up during any hiring process in the 17 years I've been doing this.
That said, I've only had two long term jobs. I spent years doing contract work, and I mostly got contracts by word of mouth.
I've been on a number of hiring teams, mostly at Puppet. I was also a hiring manager at Puppet for a while. Education never came up once — I don't remember even talking about it in interview training.
The biggest thing I've noticed between those w/o a CS degree and those with a CS degree (at least from an elite college) is the first job opportunities. Coming from a school with a very established CS program does provide a huge advantage for your first job because companies actively seek you out and give you an advantage far more than you would get if you're the one putting yourself out there (w/o a degree).
I work in New Jersey, as an Enterprise App Full-stack dev with 0 college experience.
I started as a developer 4 years ago @15/hr, and I recently breached the 6 figure mark. I've told my coworkers that I have a fire lit by a sense of inadequacy. I've always been behind classically trained developers, that is what keeps me pushing forward. Always playing 'catch-up'.
Now that I'm involved in my company's interview process, a few thoughts on what having a college degree does for our offers;
1. Because we hire through an agency, we already have a single layer of vetting that helps remove unqualified persons (both college-level and not), which ensure we have a decent, homogeneous pool to conduct face to face interviews with.
2. Whether we hire a candidate with or without a college background, our the offer range isn't enormous. If we have an offer in mind, (say 75k), having a college degree doesn't automatically grant you the high end of our scale. I can't think of a single instance where we cared about their degree once they were in the Face-to-face. Their performance in the interview dictates their offer, and we aren't asking questions like 'How do you implement bubble sort'. We ask some hard skill questions, sure, but we also ask just as many communication and general problem solving ones as well.
3. The range of starting pay is really small for us (think 75k mid, 70k min, 80k max). So that 3% gap makes a lot of sense.
To summarize, a degree may put you in a position to interview, but the range you get paid is largely depending on a wide array of skills, some of which are unrelated to development. Missing some of the hard-skills won't disqualify you for a position as much as missing the communication skills will (for us).
I am also self-taught, and I dropped out of school after three semesters, having taken no CS courses. It's difficult to use my experience as a reference, since that was 25 years ago, and I have consistently prioritized meaningful/interesting work over compensation in my career choices; but I have never had any trouble getting hired on at the companies I wanted to work for, including places which have the reputation of caring a lot about degrees. My impression is that degrees get you in the door but stop mattering after you're 5-8 years into your career, provided you've managed to pick up basic CS concepts at some point (big-O, graphs, all the stuff people love to hate about tech interviews).
Do you have similar data for companies outside USA, specifically Canada? Salaries in Bay Area, Seattle and NY are quite higher than other tech hubs, but I want to know what the differences are from Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal and Vancouver. From my research, data outside the US is very limited and outdated.
Self-taught programmer here. A long time ago, I lucked out with an internal promotion that helped me bridge the gap from support to engineering. Getting a foot in the door was the hard part. Ever since then, lack of a degree has been a non-factor during the hiring process. I've got years of experience and plenty of references to vouch for my abilities.
The only thing I feel like I missed out on compared to a CS grad is a better intuition for big O. I just don't have any use for it in real life, so it never really clicked. Good benchmarking tools are all I've ever needed. But it would be nice for my own intellectual gratification.
I too have an unrelated degree and am self taught. I also make much less than the numbers in the provided tool but more than make up for it by living in a low cost area where developers are always in huge demand.
I have found the biggest discriminator on hiring salary and hiring generally is due to approach to problem. If you are limited to a single convention, such as OOP, or are limited to certain tools/frameworks businesses are less eager to hire you. In theory that makes sense in that you are more valuable if you can provide an original direct solution to a problem with greater ease. In practice it doesn’t make sense because those limitations tat prove to be a negative bias during hiring tend to be the reality internally.
I studied AI but never finished it. Dropped out just before starting on my Master's thesis. Bachelor's didn't exist here at the time, so no degree. I only once encountered a job where this was a problem. By now, my CV is much more relevant than any degree.
I've also seen people graduate who couldn't do anything, so a CS degree is not proof that someone can do the job, and not having it is not proof that someone can't. I think university education is still extremely valuable, and I'm glad I've had it, but more for what I learned than for the piece of paper.
That said, salaries in Amsterdam, with or without degree, are far lower than the $130k to $150k described here.
In my experience, the one place where educational signaling affects outcomes in tech is the visa application process for immigrants. As in, can you get a visa at all, and how easy it is to cross the border (both to start work, as well as to go home to see family for the holidays).
I wouldn't expect Triplebyte to be able to observe this, because it only works with candidates who are US citizens, permanent residents, residents of Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Australia, or, have an existing H-1B visa (per the Candidate FAQ: https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq).
Can you share what the distribution of companies you source to is? Ie are they mostly early stage startups or do they include many large post ipo tech companies?
I have no CS degree either and mostly found that this isn't an issue with technical interviewers, BUT there is one place where it does matter: USCIS requirements for high tech work visas requires either a degree or "equivalent" work experience. I happen to have well over a decade of work experience under my belt and was able to get my work visa thanks to that, but this is definitely a real barrier if you're outside of the US and your goal is to get a silicon valley career.
Don't think I disagree with Bryan's take, but to be fair, he's generally pretty down on the whole higher education thing across the spectrum, not just for Computer Science.
Hey Ben! What a great tool. This is helping ensure we higher at market rates.
I think I may have found a tiny bug: the “all Triplebyte” dropdown seems to always reset the previous dropdown to “all company sizes” and visa versa so it’s impossible to have both selected to something other than the first options. Perhaps this is because data doesn’t exist for both? Maybe it’s just a slightly confusing UX.
It’s such a thoughtfully considered tool that I thought you’d appreciate my considered feedback.
After a career in finance, including an MBA + accounting certification, I learned programming at my kitchen table nights and weekends, entirely from books (this was in the '90's). No formal CS education.
I didn't perceive any issues with the lack of the CS degree, but I also refused to consider FAANG.
Even being the less-favored gender, I agree with the SF salary data. It conforms to my experience here.
> “One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries”
Why are you mistakenly confusing education for education signalling?
There are many types of skills required to be an effective software engineer. Most of them have nothing to do with mastery of a programming language or technical tool, and have zero connection to solving coding puzzles in a short timeframe or memorizing answers to classic systems design questions.
You need to be a skilled writer and researcher to deduce business use cases and write effective summaries, presentations or user documentation.
You need appreciation for potentially many other knowledge domains, from legal topics & security to applied sciences. Having basic coursework in calculus, chemistry, physics, rhetoric, history & civics, etc., are crucially important in business settings.
It seems so tone deaf to me to baldly state that education signalling is a factor here, as if signalling was the phenomenon (it’s not).
Education (as opposed to education signalling) is a very valuable thing, and certainly fosters more effective engineers by a landslide.
The popularity of hiring from bootcamps or non-traditional engineering backgrounds is a commoditization issue, meant to suppress wages from growing as labor productivity creates dramatically greater returns.
There’s no shortage of engineers... there’s a shortage of “cheap” engineers (and yes, $130k is a cheap price for these types of hires).
I do not have a college degree or bootcamp experience, do not put an "education" section on my resume, and only asked about it ~1/4 times in interviews/contacts. I am paid well at my "lead engineer" role at a fortune 100.
My open source/side project experience has opened doors though I'm sure.
Out of curiosity, what does the data look like for the top 10 most elite colleges vs all other colleges? My guess is all other colleges combined look more like boot camp data.
> Could this be indicating that [boot camp grads] at a disadvantage?
Yes. Most boot camps are outright scams and I know that I (along with everyone I know) has never hired a bootcamp grad. They usually cannot write fizzbuzz.
Some anecdata on the college grad note: most of the best engineers I've worked with did not study CS in college, though they all did graduate from college.
Awesome tool! Though I'm personally happy to hear compensation isn't weighted based on formal education, I'm not sure I'd f eel the same way if I did complete University... I'm self-taught without a degree, ended up moving from Wales to Silicon Valley when I was 20 and only really felt education was a concern for my first role, and visa. Many of the companies who didn't respond to my application years ago now target me on LinkedIn. It's occasionally awkward when folks asked where I studied, but have gotten used to it now
It's nice to know what a competitive base salary is for an engineer but when negotiating an offer I think you really should be looking at Total Compensation. RSU, Stock Options, Bonuses all play a very significant role when looking at offers. Especially if you work at one of the large tech companies (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) the stock grants are a VERY large portion of your compensation.
You should, but it looks like triplebyte was explicitly ignoring that because it would add too many dimensions to the graph and those benefits are hard to value. Stock options are not a liquid asset, and their value can change wildly and unpredictably. Ask all those programmers around in 2001 how much their options were worth.
That would be a lot more interesting but it's also super hard to compare equity for public companies and different stages of startups. It probably makes better sense to split the companies into different categories and then do the comparison in the same category
If I'm being cynical, TripleByte left this out on purpose. From what I've heard, they're mainly linking developers up with startup roles that don't pay much more than this (except perhaps in monopoly-money equity).
Of course, you'd be better off going to FANG or a (soon-to-IPO) unicorn where you'd make double these amounts with RSUs factored in. But if you can get in there, you probably don't need to go through TripleByte.
Agree with this. To get any insight on what actual compensation looks like, one option can be to add a filter by publicly traded companies and add equity value to those.
I'm in Boston & went through an intensive FT job search here about 18 months ago. I'm a mobile developer with 20+ years total experience in desktop, backend, web+mobile, product management, started my own company, etc.
Worked with lots of recruiters, personal network etc., felt like I really got a sense of what the salary landscape is here. Some facts:
- I was leaving a job at a hot unicorn startup that paid $125K base and I was told I was one of the highest paid engineers on staff (20+ engineers)
- I received 2 offers during this job search (was very selective else could have gotten many, many more)
- First offer: IOS developer at very large consulting firm for $120K base (with possibility of small bonus).
- Second offer: IOS developer position that was comparable in interest to first. Decided to "shoot for the moon" and ask for $145K. They agreed, and that's where I'm (happily) working now.
According to this study, SW engineers with my level of experience in these cities are making $181K on average! From what I could see that's just not available here to the rank and file, "average" experienced sw engineer. That salary would be more like top-of-range here.
Am I doing something wrong? Is Boston really that different than Seattle/NYC/SF?
Yes. You didn't really negotiate. Ideally you interview broadly, then use the higher offers at companies that aren't you top choice to boost the offers from companies that aren't your top choice that offered less---and then use those offers to boost your actual top choice.
For example, company A offered 100k, B offered 120k, and C offered 130k. You want company A. You say to company B that company C offered 130k and you're interested but not sure with that diff. They up to 135. You say to company C, hey, company B offered 135, can you help me lower the diff? They up to 140. Then you go to company A, say you'd love to, but you have offers for 135 and 140, so if they could do anything to lower the diff, great. They offer 130. At this point, you have three offers, all higher than you began with and can make a choice.
I don't think it's a Boston problem. Perhaps a company selection problem though. Have you tried to interview at Google (Or facebook, amazon, apple, netflix, microsoft)?. If that 20+ years is actual work experience, as opposed to coding up BASIC games during middle school, I am sure you'd get offers at 300k+ total annual comp at those places if you passed the interview.
I haven't hired in Boston in a few years, so my perspective may be out of date, but it definitely was the case up until 2014 or so (my most recent concrete experience making job offers to candidates in Boston) that Boston salaries for engineers were lower than SF and NYC.
That seems mostly to be a supply/demand thing (which is tangled up with local culture norms, too, in complicated ways). There is much, much less VC funding in Boston than in SF and NYC. But a great supply of engineers because of the universities. And there's no equivalent to Microsoft+Amazon (Seattle) and Wall Street (NYC) pushing up both demand and top-end base salaries for experienced engineers.
Also, you mention that your search was 18 months ago. In SF (and I think Seattle and NYC, too) the job market is crazily engineer-favorable right now. I'd bet there's been 10% inflation in average base senior engineer salaries in SF in the last 18 months. That would match your $145k against ~$165k (rather than $181k).
Having lived in Seattle and knowing several software engineers at various companies, I would have to say Triplebyte's numbers are being inflated by the FAANG companies. I have one friend at Microsoft that is making probably 160 to 180ish right now, and another friend at a startup that is making between 80 and 100. Most other engineers make around what you've been offered. I really would take Triplebyte's numbers with a grain of salt.
I also work in Boston and have done so since 2010. My experience has been the same as yours. A little over 15 years of experience, worked at a fairly well-known Boston startup, now in a VP level at a digital agency and I was also shocked at the kind of salaries indicated here. I don't feel I could command $180,000 in Boston even with all my experience.
You're not doing anything wrong. I just don't think Boston pays these kind of salaries (yet). We've got a burgeoning tech scene here but compensation isn't at the same level. When I was looking to relocate back to Denver a few years ago, Boston salaries were much higher than what I was seeing out there.
I know the Google SWEs in Boston tend to get paid (net comp) much higher than that for senior positions, though I am not very familiar with Boston.
On the west coast you'll usually get paid a significantly higher salary in Seattle/SF than most of the other cities with any tech presence (e.g. Portland, LA, San Diego, etc).
Salaries are tied to cost of labor/employment, which varies by city. It is generally correlated with cost of living, though (otherwise people move away), so it balances slowly minus network effect adjustments.
FWIW, I thought the SF numbers in that article were low for mainstream companies, but high for startups.
Purely based on my 'gut' (though I've been around):
1) SF/NY/Seattle salaries are skewed by really rich companies
2) Yes, there a big uptick as it's more competitive, FYI cost of living is much more.
3) The salary I think has a selection/sample problem that probably over estimates.
My bet is $150K for an experienced dev at a normal company in Boston is probably somewhere in the league of normal.
Consider that salaries are not as an efficient a market as we might imagine. If Boston area companies can get away with paying $140 instead of $180 they will! Most people don't move across the country for a pay raise. Worker mobility in the US is down over the last 30 year (weirdly).
SF has a lot of people moving there which creates a different kind of frothy market.
Boston is established and so everything gets established, including salaries.
Consider the situation: imagine if you had a company making ok profit, with 50 Engineers in Beantown. Do you think you could all of a sudden get your Eng. to the 'next level' by paying SF rates?
So you're staffing costs are way up, but is productivity? Surely, you might be able to bring on the best hires, but will that make all the difference?
It's such a big bet, and the inclination is always to make (or save) money 'now'.
It's a little bit like the 'open vs. closed office' calculation. The CFO can make a direct and measurable compelling case for open office: it's 20% cheaper. Those in favour of a nicer office can't provide the hard numbers on how much the company would increase productivity.
I think salary differentials are a crazy interesting subject and suspect there are a lot of weird and interesting things going on.
I'm from Canada, where any good developer can double their salary by moving to a choice job in the US. Why the hell would young talent stay? Which implies, how the hell can Canadian companies even remotely compete on building great companies of the top tier talent leaves?
Obviously this depends a lot on a companies specific need for hyper-top tier talent, those that don't would maybe be better off out of the Valley.
I also wonder a lot on what would happen if a well funded Canadian startup actually started paying super great salaries. Sure, they'd be able to get the best talent that comes through the door ... but then there's the other paradox: most Canadian cities are not destinations! Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver are regular cities, if you start a company there, most of your applicants will be local. It stands that local talent may not be all that spectacular (good but not great) thereby not justifying really big salaries. And can you really have 'regular salary' for the 'regular, local talent' and then inflated salaries for the international hot talent? That might be hard!
So SF, NY and Seattle have the advantage of being destinations, i.e. cities where people are willing to move, meaning that their quest for talent is really a not a function of the locals, but the top tier of a much broader pool of talent.
Years of experience tops out at "8+"? An engineer that started working at 22 is barely 30 by the time they reach that experience level. Is 8 years really the point where additional experience ceases to have a meaningful effect on salary? Or do these three cities (SF/NYC/Seattle) just do a pretty good job of expelling software engineers after they attain their first gray hair?
At the big tech companies, you normally reach the "terminal level" (i.e. there's no more up-or-out pressure) within ~5 years. It's entirely possible to reach that level and then keep working another 30 years without a promotion. And even if you do strive to continue getting promoted, each level is significantly more difficult and could take another 5+ years to reach.
It may be the case that for a variety of reasons, salaries don't creep up that much past 8 years as it's just more difficult to either signal or create value then.
Despite the fact that a polygot dev. with tons of experience is always good to have around, and you need some weighing in on big decisions ... most dev is just dev - and a competent mid-tier developer with good habits can do the job in most cases.
I'd argue that when it comes to writing code, technology changes fast enough that after a decade, you've hit a pretty clear plateau. You've got the fundamentals down, and you're a master of your current language.
There's a lot of managerial things you continue to learn, but that requires you to be in a position with enough political capital to actually stop history from repeating itself. It's only useful knowing that Project X will fail, if you can convince people to instead do the more successful X++. I'd expect job title to be a much better indicator here: having 20 years of experience doesn't mean you have the aptitude or inclination to succeed at office politics.
I think Triplebyte is stuck between a few incentives that aren't necessarily aligned with developers, and I'm not sure how to decide how I feel about their contributions overall to the job market for software.
I absolutely love their outreach and data like this where they try to empower developers more.
My problem I have is that they entered the market using the same exact worn-out old methods that everyone has been trying to use to hire for software forever. They do a timed coding challenge, they ask we-need-to-hear-the-right-answer quiz questions about both algorithms, and topic-specific areas for web/mobile/back end.
All they've done is dress everything up in fancy clothes and used an interface UX tuned towards developer's sensibilities. They absolutely bombard all major programming related internet sites/communities with their stupid click-bait "only 2% of green-skinned back end browser developers living at least 100ft above sea level get this question right!!!!111!1!1one1!" ads. Their initial, multiple-choice "gotcha!" quiz should be passed by a second year CS (or any eng.) student with a tiny amount of thought, but it makes developers feel like they've already just "beat" someone else out and "accomplished" something and it plays a psychological game with them to get them to commit to the extended live interview. (It worked on me!)
Do they have data about how their candidates perform after hire? 2 yr performance reviews? 2 yr turnover rates? How do they market to the recruiters who are their true "customers"?
To me their product seems like something that hiring managers and in-house recruiters can use to remove liability for bad hires. Has anyone ever worked with them through recruiting to see if the value proposition is there for eliminating bad phone screens? I don't think initial phone screens are terribly difficult to do for a senior engineer with experience, to root out red flags. Is it a better value prop on your expensive on-site interview slots to trust Triplebyte? Or your own internal senior engineers/hiring managers?
I'm not saying that Triplebyte has direclty nefarious intentions or anything like that. I just am no sure I see how their incentives are aligned with me as a developer, in quite the same way they market as ("We are god's gift to developers").
> Do they have data about how their candidates perform after hire? 2 yr performance reviews? 2 yr turnover rates? How do they market to the recruiters who are their true "customers"?
Software engineering hiring, and Triplebyte as a company, at least think about, and make an attempt to evaluate these concerns. Have you ever seen how non-technical people (sales/marketing/finance) are evaluated? I'd argue Triplebyte at least moves the needle a bit versus in other fields.
Base salary is a pretty useless statistic in tech. Almost all higher paying jobs are going to have a large component of the compensation in equity or discretionary bonuses.
That pretty much depends. Imagine a startup that offers stock options, which you only can use, if it ever goes public. And in the end it doesn't (for example it's bought), and resulting amount you get as compensation for those options is a lot lower than what it could be from the public scenario. So it's simply a gamble. While base salary is a solid metric.
Interesting to see that this is not a normal distribution. The modal salary is closer to $135k, the median $146k, and as we see labelled, the mean at $149. Not the idealized bell curve taught about in statistics class. That long tail on the right side is pulling the mean up and away from the mode and median.
Honestly, I'm not sure why I expected a classic bell curve instead of a long right tail.
Edit: playing with the data, looking at some of the sub-distributions, (e.g. front-end engineers with 3-5 years experience at all company sizes) do look a bit closer to normal distributions, but in many, there's still that long tail to the right.
Now, what to do with this information? Perhaps I can play it to my advantage when attempting to negotiate a raise or a salary with a new company.
Kudos to TripleByte for their efforts in making this kind of compensation information public! I referenced it during my last performance review discussion in an effort to negotiate for a raise that would bring my comp more in line with what was listed as the median in TripleByte's data.
I was pretty firm on insisting on a bigger raise based on that data, after which my boss's boss came in with the big guns. They had a spreadsheet of compensation data collected by investors in the startup, and this data was collated across all their (and other) portfolio companies.
It was broken down by total funding, company size, years of experience, role, all that. IIRC, it was Option Impact: https://www.advanced-hr.com/. I wish I could've looked at it more, such interesting information with specific numbers. Of course, that will never be made public, much to the detriment of the workers in tech.
I just left my company that swore up and down that they work hard to pay competitive market salaries. They claim to have all this fancy compensation market data compiled by experts. I don't know why they trust this data so much, but it consistently shows lower salaries than even Glassdoor or Payscale, which tend to be lower than surveys like this one.
They don't criminally underpay or anything, but they are on the low side of average and I've been insisting that they are 20-30% under market on just base salary alone for high caliber people. No RSUs and there's some cash bonuses (maybe up to ~10%) and other near-cash perks but nothing super significant.
Well, jokes on them, I just accepted a new non-FAANG gig for a nearly-25% base salary increase, plus a significant initial RSU grant of ~1.5x salary, plus other bonus potential. And I'm more excited about the company and work anyway.
It's bananas out there right now, go get it while you can.
I imagine the signaling is partly due to the selective admissions processes at elite universities. MIT, Stanford, Harvard already vetted for you, so surely you must be intelligent, driven and cut above the rest.
But I wonder if there are recent studies on the demographics of who attends elite universities in general? I'd assume it is mostly kids from the upper middle class to upper class backgrounds.
These sort of places pat themselves on the back for saying they do target minorities and the less privileged, but they have such an insurmountable background to overcome they may never make it to such schools, despite being smart enough to attend.
This just shows how game changing bootcamps and the like are. People with no software background can go from no experience to a job paying 130k a year with a year of training. That's downright miraculous.
I think it says more about how unrelated traditional CS programs are to getting students "work force ready".
While I wont deny the foundational knowledge that CS degrees can offer, it doesn't seem to make much a difference in earning potential.
The biggest difference between CS degree holders and bootcampers / no degree holders is the amount of time + effort required to land that first job. It seems that once you land that first job, there is not a huge difference in earnings between traditional and non-traditional engineers.
Will be interesting to see how it plays out over time. I'm curious what the average earnings will be between bootcampers vs 'others' in 15-20 years.
I'm not sure that this is what this data means. This report seems to be based on a very specific dataset of Triplebyte registered accounts. There are probably far more bootcamp grads that do not work as a developer and/or not registered on Triplebyte that are unaccounted for. Even bootcamp sites are probably inflating their salaries by only reporting those that graduates AND got a job in SWE.
Isn't it in triplebtyte's interest for these numbers to be inflated? The data seems to be at the heart of a conflict of interest, as it would not be in the author's interest for these numbers to be lower than anticipated. I don't really trust "research", or just "data" in this case coming from a party that has a very direct interest in the results being one thing over another.
Base comp isn't a great metric because it widely varies based on compensation schema.
For exmaple, Amazon has a cap on base (I think it's 160k) and provides huge amounts of stock beyond that. I'd imagine it's a similar story for many companies.
Total comp is a far more realistic and accurate measurement.
Looking at just base salary is not useful at all for FAANG, since they all operate on total compensation. At Amazon for example, the salary is capped at $165k for all employees in Seattle (including SVP, VP, and director level).
These base estimates are much higher than what sites like Levels.fyi and anecdotal numbers I've collected from my new grad peers.
At the new grad level, Base salary numbers are $125-135k:Google, $105-115k:MSFT,Amazon,FB.
The base salary numbers at other unicorns don't sound much different either.
I am not saying that TB's numbers are wrong. But, there has to be some reason for the huge difference in the numbers I've heard vs the ones TB reports.
If you're working at a company that has multiple offices around the country (say SF, NYC, Boston), is it unreasonable to ask for the same compensation that a worker in the most expensive office gets? Assuming the role/responsibilities will be the same and the team consists of people from all offices.
So I work in a cheaper location for one of these companies and while I get paid a bit less, it's so much cheaper to live here that I can pocket a lot more.
I live in Houston, and I would say most senior (10+ year) full stack developers probably make what your 0-3 year front end developers make. In Houston, ~130k is enough to live an upper middle class life, what does that look like in NY, SF and Seattle?
These salaries for NY look high to me, and there’s almost no variation based on experience. Whereas in my experience hiring here, entry level is $60-80k and seniors command around $150k.
Now, that’s for startups. Banks will pay twice that.
I’m wondering what the medians look like - the means being displayed may be distorted by the finance and Google outliers.
Edited to add: $60k is a middle class salary for a single person in NYC. (Though people who are unaccustomed to small apartment living / the idea of singles having roommates / the idea that middle class means having to compromise on some expenses will complain otherwise.) I wouldn’t want to try to raise a family of 4 here on that income, though.
$130k is definitely upper middle class for a single person, but a family of 4 on that income is going to have to live way outside the hip areas of the outer boroughs in order to be able to afford housing.
Recently made a switch from Seattle to NYC and was actually a bit surprised that the salaries in NYC were lower. People at my job didn't really believe me, so it's nice to have some numbers to back up my feelings.
Not that surprising. Seattle is HQ to two of the largest sofware companies in the world, with 1/3 the population of NYC. Wouldn't be surprised that the supply/demand gap for qualified engineers is greater in Seattle than NYC
Interesting. But why can't I filter by city? I'd like to see the percentile plot but restricted to New York. I imagine that the shape and peak of that plot would be different for each city.
So I filtered by 8+ years of experience, back end developer and small companies assuming they wouldn’t have RSUs. Equity in a non public company is worthless to me because of the chances of them being worthless.
The salaries just aren’t that impressive for the cities in question. I can make that in much lower cost of living areas of the country.
Probably too granular, but I wish one of these tools was able to compare salaries in S.F. itself with the Bay Area as a whole. I've heard that positions in the city pay greater than those in Silicon Valley, but I don't know how accurate that is.
It’s so interesting to see actual data that confirms what most people might suspect, instead of what you see here on HN where people talk about $200k+ base being “not that unusual”.
The data is on average base salary. Nearly half of my total comp is stock plus guaranteed bonus. That's how my total comp is $200k+ with 1 yoe at a low CoL city.
I generally consider comp numbers on public forums to be a bit like salaries on dating profiles. Even if you're not inflating the number and even if you're anonymous, there's a status drive to "round up", and the ones open to talking about the numbers generally know their numbers are pretty good.
I trust Triplebyte's data to be more representative because it's not one internet identity at a time stating their own number.
out of curiosity, how come you measure base, rather than total comp? are the bonus and RSU comp pretty similar among top-tier companies?
It seems like only comparing base makes it harder to compare smaller companies (which usually give you all your comp as base) with larger companies (where 30% seems to be rsu and bonus)
Bay Area tech companies are also matching this base pay with RSU's, and total compensation should be roughly twice this. If companies are offering that much in St. Louis, sign me up.
i have no degree. I am a FE 10 years experience in DC. I make only 150k but without seeing this data for my city. which is probably about 5-8% lower than NYC.
beneichler|7 years ago
The finding that most surprised me was that the mean salary for an engineer without a college degree is only $3k (~2%) less than for those with one; this gap is much smaller than in the labor market as a whole. One explanation is that CS really is a field where educational signaling doesn't (or at least needn't) matter as much as in other industries - we recently discussed this with Bryan Caplan over on our blog (https://triplebyte.com/blog/bryan-caplan-interview). I'm self-taught and don't have a CS degree, but I do have a college degree which still opens doors. I'd be curious to hear from other developers without a formal background on this.
Boot-camp grads average $19k less - but $130k is still quite a bit higher than I've seen bootcamps advertising. Could this be indicating that they're at a disadvantage in the normal hiring process just for signaling reasons?
esoterica|7 years ago
The sample set of people using TripleByte is not going to be remotely representative of the market for developers as a whole. Candidates with stronger resumes are not going to be using third party recruiters to spray their resume around; they are going to be applying directly to the companies they want to work at or getting headhunted by the companies themselves.
danielparks|7 years ago
I'm a high school drop out with no diploma. It's never come up during any hiring process in the 17 years I've been doing this.
That said, I've only had two long term jobs. I spent years doing contract work, and I mostly got contracts by word of mouth.
I've been on a number of hiring teams, mostly at Puppet. I was also a hiring manager at Puppet for a while. Education never came up once — I don't remember even talking about it in interview training.
ar_lan|7 years ago
Pinbenterjamin|7 years ago
I work in New Jersey, as an Enterprise App Full-stack dev with 0 college experience.
I started as a developer 4 years ago @15/hr, and I recently breached the 6 figure mark. I've told my coworkers that I have a fire lit by a sense of inadequacy. I've always been behind classically trained developers, that is what keeps me pushing forward. Always playing 'catch-up'.
Now that I'm involved in my company's interview process, a few thoughts on what having a college degree does for our offers;
1. Because we hire through an agency, we already have a single layer of vetting that helps remove unqualified persons (both college-level and not), which ensure we have a decent, homogeneous pool to conduct face to face interviews with.
2. Whether we hire a candidate with or without a college background, our the offer range isn't enormous. If we have an offer in mind, (say 75k), having a college degree doesn't automatically grant you the high end of our scale. I can't think of a single instance where we cared about their degree once they were in the Face-to-face. Their performance in the interview dictates their offer, and we aren't asking questions like 'How do you implement bubble sort'. We ask some hard skill questions, sure, but we also ask just as many communication and general problem solving ones as well.
3. The range of starting pay is really small for us (think 75k mid, 70k min, 80k max). So that 3% gap makes a lot of sense.
To summarize, a degree may put you in a position to interview, but the range you get paid is largely depending on a wide array of skills, some of which are unrelated to development. Missing some of the hard-skills won't disqualify you for a position as much as missing the communication skills will (for us).
marssaxman|7 years ago
john_petrucci|7 years ago
archgoon|7 years ago
Total Comp figures are important, and differences in effective take home pay will be hidden if you only list salaries.
jniedrauer|7 years ago
The only thing I feel like I missed out on compared to a CS grad is a better intuition for big O. I just don't have any use for it in real life, so it never really clicked. Good benchmarking tools are all I've ever needed. But it would be nice for my own intellectual gratification.
austincheney|7 years ago
I have found the biggest discriminator on hiring salary and hiring generally is due to approach to problem. If you are limited to a single convention, such as OOP, or are limited to certain tools/frameworks businesses are less eager to hire you. In theory that makes sense in that you are more valuable if you can provide an original direct solution to a problem with greater ease. In practice it doesn’t make sense because those limitations tat prove to be a negative bias during hiring tend to be the reality internally.
mcv|7 years ago
I've also seen people graduate who couldn't do anything, so a CS degree is not proof that someone can do the job, and not having it is not proof that someone can't. I think university education is still extremely valuable, and I'm glad I've had it, but more for what I learned than for the piece of paper.
That said, salaries in Amsterdam, with or without degree, are far lower than the $130k to $150k described here.
cbhl|7 years ago
I wouldn't expect Triplebyte to be able to observe this, because it only works with candidates who are US citizens, permanent residents, residents of Canada, Mexico, Singapore, Chile, Australia, or, have an existing H-1B visa (per the Candidate FAQ: https://triplebyte.com/candidate_faq).
shereadsthenews|7 years ago
danielvinson|7 years ago
friedman23|7 years ago
Are these base salaries or total compensation?
Can you share what the distribution of companies you source to is? Ie are they mostly early stage startups or do they include many large post ipo tech companies?
lhorie|7 years ago
rayvd|7 years ago
seancoleman|7 years ago
I think I may have found a tiny bug: the “all Triplebyte” dropdown seems to always reset the previous dropdown to “all company sizes” and visa versa so it’s impossible to have both selected to something other than the first options. Perhaps this is because data doesn’t exist for both? Maybe it’s just a slightly confusing UX.
It’s such a thoughtfully considered tool that I thought you’d appreciate my considered feedback.
Thanks!
daphneokeefe|7 years ago
mlthoughts2018|7 years ago
Why are you mistakenly confusing education for education signalling?
There are many types of skills required to be an effective software engineer. Most of them have nothing to do with mastery of a programming language or technical tool, and have zero connection to solving coding puzzles in a short timeframe or memorizing answers to classic systems design questions.
You need to be a skilled writer and researcher to deduce business use cases and write effective summaries, presentations or user documentation.
You need appreciation for potentially many other knowledge domains, from legal topics & security to applied sciences. Having basic coursework in calculus, chemistry, physics, rhetoric, history & civics, etc., are crucially important in business settings.
It seems so tone deaf to me to baldly state that education signalling is a factor here, as if signalling was the phenomenon (it’s not).
Education (as opposed to education signalling) is a very valuable thing, and certainly fosters more effective engineers by a landslide.
The popularity of hiring from bootcamps or non-traditional engineering backgrounds is a commoditization issue, meant to suppress wages from growing as labor productivity creates dramatically greater returns.
There’s no shortage of engineers... there’s a shortage of “cheap” engineers (and yes, $130k is a cheap price for these types of hires).
cozuya|7 years ago
My open source/side project experience has opened doors though I'm sure.
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
ohaideredevs|7 years ago
cm2012|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
lrajlich|7 years ago
sldjfkdsljffkjd|7 years ago
Yes. Most boot camps are outright scams and I know that I (along with everyone I know) has never hired a bootcamp grad. They usually cannot write fizzbuzz.
Some anecdata on the college grad note: most of the best engineers I've worked with did not study CS in college, though they all did graduate from college.
syntaxing|7 years ago
nbakshi|7 years ago
wellreally|7 years ago
geggam|7 years ago
cimmanom|7 years ago
sk8tadmon|7 years ago
[deleted]
Gibbon1|7 years ago
[deleted]
martin_|7 years ago
garyguo110|7 years ago
jalgos_eminator|7 years ago
echevil|7 years ago
freyir|7 years ago
Of course, you'd be better off going to FANG or a (soon-to-IPO) unicorn where you'd make double these amounts with RSUs factored in. But if you can get in there, you probably don't need to go through TripleByte.
Then again, TripleByte also created https://www.levels.fyi/comp.html so maybe I am just being cynical.
dmode|7 years ago
badfrog|7 years ago
_throwawayyyyy1|7 years ago
Worked with lots of recruiters, personal network etc., felt like I really got a sense of what the salary landscape is here. Some facts:
- I was leaving a job at a hot unicorn startup that paid $125K base and I was told I was one of the highest paid engineers on staff (20+ engineers)
- I received 2 offers during this job search (was very selective else could have gotten many, many more)
- First offer: IOS developer at very large consulting firm for $120K base (with possibility of small bonus).
- Second offer: IOS developer position that was comparable in interest to first. Decided to "shoot for the moon" and ask for $145K. They agreed, and that's where I'm (happily) working now.
According to this study, SW engineers with my level of experience in these cities are making $181K on average! From what I could see that's just not available here to the rank and file, "average" experienced sw engineer. That salary would be more like top-of-range here.
Am I doing something wrong? Is Boston really that different than Seattle/NYC/SF?
morgtheborg|7 years ago
For example, company A offered 100k, B offered 120k, and C offered 130k. You want company A. You say to company B that company C offered 130k and you're interested but not sure with that diff. They up to 135. You say to company C, hey, company B offered 135, can you help me lower the diff? They up to 140. Then you go to company A, say you'd love to, but you have offers for 135 and 140, so if they could do anything to lower the diff, great. They offer 130. At this point, you have three offers, all higher than you began with and can make a choice.
robrenaud|7 years ago
kwindla|7 years ago
That seems mostly to be a supply/demand thing (which is tangled up with local culture norms, too, in complicated ways). There is much, much less VC funding in Boston than in SF and NYC. But a great supply of engineers because of the universities. And there's no equivalent to Microsoft+Amazon (Seattle) and Wall Street (NYC) pushing up both demand and top-end base salaries for experienced engineers.
Also, you mention that your search was 18 months ago. In SF (and I think Seattle and NYC, too) the job market is crazily engineer-favorable right now. I'd bet there's been 10% inflation in average base senior engineer salaries in SF in the last 18 months. That would match your $145k against ~$165k (rather than $181k).
shepardrtc|7 years ago
wildmindwriting|7 years ago
You're not doing anything wrong. I just don't think Boston pays these kind of salaries (yet). We've got a burgeoning tech scene here but compensation isn't at the same level. When I was looking to relocate back to Denver a few years ago, Boston salaries were much higher than what I was seeing out there.
chris_va|7 years ago
On the west coast you'll usually get paid a significantly higher salary in Seattle/SF than most of the other cities with any tech presence (e.g. Portland, LA, San Diego, etc).
Salaries are tied to cost of labor/employment, which varies by city. It is generally correlated with cost of living, though (otherwise people move away), so it balances slowly minus network effect adjustments.
FWIW, I thought the SF numbers in that article were low for mainstream companies, but high for startups.
UweSchmidt|7 years ago
_throwawayyyyy1|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
sonnyblarney|7 years ago
1) SF/NY/Seattle salaries are skewed by really rich companies 2) Yes, there a big uptick as it's more competitive, FYI cost of living is much more. 3) The salary I think has a selection/sample problem that probably over estimates.
My bet is $150K for an experienced dev at a normal company in Boston is probably somewhere in the league of normal.
Consider that salaries are not as an efficient a market as we might imagine. If Boston area companies can get away with paying $140 instead of $180 they will! Most people don't move across the country for a pay raise. Worker mobility in the US is down over the last 30 year (weirdly).
SF has a lot of people moving there which creates a different kind of frothy market.
Boston is established and so everything gets established, including salaries.
Consider the situation: imagine if you had a company making ok profit, with 50 Engineers in Beantown. Do you think you could all of a sudden get your Eng. to the 'next level' by paying SF rates?
So you're staffing costs are way up, but is productivity? Surely, you might be able to bring on the best hires, but will that make all the difference?
It's such a big bet, and the inclination is always to make (or save) money 'now'.
It's a little bit like the 'open vs. closed office' calculation. The CFO can make a direct and measurable compelling case for open office: it's 20% cheaper. Those in favour of a nicer office can't provide the hard numbers on how much the company would increase productivity.
I think salary differentials are a crazy interesting subject and suspect there are a lot of weird and interesting things going on.
I'm from Canada, where any good developer can double their salary by moving to a choice job in the US. Why the hell would young talent stay? Which implies, how the hell can Canadian companies even remotely compete on building great companies of the top tier talent leaves?
Obviously this depends a lot on a companies specific need for hyper-top tier talent, those that don't would maybe be better off out of the Valley.
I also wonder a lot on what would happen if a well funded Canadian startup actually started paying super great salaries. Sure, they'd be able to get the best talent that comes through the door ... but then there's the other paradox: most Canadian cities are not destinations! Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver are regular cities, if you start a company there, most of your applicants will be local. It stands that local talent may not be all that spectacular (good but not great) thereby not justifying really big salaries. And can you really have 'regular salary' for the 'regular, local talent' and then inflated salaries for the international hot talent? That might be hard!
So SF, NY and Seattle have the advantage of being destinations, i.e. cities where people are willing to move, meaning that their quest for talent is really a not a function of the locals, but the top tier of a much broader pool of talent.
jcadam|7 years ago
foota|7 years ago
badfrog|7 years ago
m3at|7 years ago
sonnyblarney|7 years ago
Despite the fact that a polygot dev. with tons of experience is always good to have around, and you need some weighing in on big decisions ... most dev is just dev - and a competent mid-tier developer with good habits can do the job in most cases.
MrPea|7 years ago
[deleted]
maccio92|7 years ago
handoflixue|7 years ago
There's a lot of managerial things you continue to learn, but that requires you to be in a position with enough political capital to actually stop history from repeating itself. It's only useful knowing that Project X will fail, if you can convince people to instead do the more successful X++. I'd expect job title to be a much better indicator here: having 20 years of experience doesn't mean you have the aptitude or inclination to succeed at office politics.
Benjammer|7 years ago
I think Triplebyte is stuck between a few incentives that aren't necessarily aligned with developers, and I'm not sure how to decide how I feel about their contributions overall to the job market for software.
I absolutely love their outreach and data like this where they try to empower developers more.
My problem I have is that they entered the market using the same exact worn-out old methods that everyone has been trying to use to hire for software forever. They do a timed coding challenge, they ask we-need-to-hear-the-right-answer quiz questions about both algorithms, and topic-specific areas for web/mobile/back end.
All they've done is dress everything up in fancy clothes and used an interface UX tuned towards developer's sensibilities. They absolutely bombard all major programming related internet sites/communities with their stupid click-bait "only 2% of green-skinned back end browser developers living at least 100ft above sea level get this question right!!!!111!1!1one1!" ads. Their initial, multiple-choice "gotcha!" quiz should be passed by a second year CS (or any eng.) student with a tiny amount of thought, but it makes developers feel like they've already just "beat" someone else out and "accomplished" something and it plays a psychological game with them to get them to commit to the extended live interview. (It worked on me!)
Do they have data about how their candidates perform after hire? 2 yr performance reviews? 2 yr turnover rates? How do they market to the recruiters who are their true "customers"?
To me their product seems like something that hiring managers and in-house recruiters can use to remove liability for bad hires. Has anyone ever worked with them through recruiting to see if the value proposition is there for eliminating bad phone screens? I don't think initial phone screens are terribly difficult to do for a senior engineer with experience, to root out red flags. Is it a better value prop on your expensive on-site interview slots to trust Triplebyte? Or your own internal senior engineers/hiring managers?
I'm not saying that Triplebyte has direclty nefarious intentions or anything like that. I just am no sure I see how their incentives are aligned with me as a developer, in quite the same way they market as ("We are god's gift to developers").
sciencewolf|7 years ago
Software engineering hiring, and Triplebyte as a company, at least think about, and make an attempt to evaluate these concerns. Have you ever seen how non-technical people (sales/marketing/finance) are evaluated? I'd argue Triplebyte at least moves the needle a bit versus in other fields.
davidjnelson|7 years ago
esoterica|7 years ago
shmerl|7 years ago
draw_down|7 years ago
[deleted]
korethr|7 years ago
Honestly, I'm not sure why I expected a classic bell curve instead of a long right tail.
Edit: playing with the data, looking at some of the sub-distributions, (e.g. front-end engineers with 3-5 years experience at all company sizes) do look a bit closer to normal distributions, but in many, there's still that long tail to the right.
Now, what to do with this information? Perhaps I can play it to my advantage when attempting to negotiate a raise or a salary with a new company.
dilyevsky|7 years ago
frakkingcylons|7 years ago
I was pretty firm on insisting on a bigger raise based on that data, after which my boss's boss came in with the big guns. They had a spreadsheet of compensation data collected by investors in the startup, and this data was collated across all their (and other) portfolio companies.
It was broken down by total funding, company size, years of experience, role, all that. IIRC, it was Option Impact: https://www.advanced-hr.com/. I wish I could've looked at it more, such interesting information with specific numbers. Of course, that will never be made public, much to the detriment of the workers in tech.
ptmcc|7 years ago
They don't criminally underpay or anything, but they are on the low side of average and I've been insisting that they are 20-30% under market on just base salary alone for high caliber people. No RSUs and there's some cash bonuses (maybe up to ~10%) and other near-cash perks but nothing super significant.
Well, jokes on them, I just accepted a new non-FAANG gig for a nearly-25% base salary increase, plus a significant initial RSU grant of ~1.5x salary, plus other bonus potential. And I'm more excited about the company and work anyway.
It's bananas out there right now, go get it while you can.
many_indicator|7 years ago
But I wonder if there are recent studies on the demographics of who attends elite universities in general? I'd assume it is mostly kids from the upper middle class to upper class backgrounds.
These sort of places pat themselves on the back for saying they do target minorities and the less privileged, but they have such an insurmountable background to overcome they may never make it to such schools, despite being smart enough to attend.
You may miss people like: https://www.uidaho.edu/engr/news/features/tom-mueller
beneichler|7 years ago
cm2012|7 years ago
protonimitate|7 years ago
While I wont deny the foundational knowledge that CS degrees can offer, it doesn't seem to make much a difference in earning potential.
The biggest difference between CS degree holders and bootcampers / no degree holders is the amount of time + effort required to land that first job. It seems that once you land that first job, there is not a huge difference in earnings between traditional and non-traditional engineers.
Will be interesting to see how it plays out over time. I'm curious what the average earnings will be between bootcampers vs 'others' in 15-20 years.
JoshTko|7 years ago
sjg007|7 years ago
crsv|7 years ago
jorblumesea|7 years ago
For exmaple, Amazon has a cap on base (I think it's 160k) and provides huge amounts of stock beyond that. I'd imagine it's a similar story for many companies.
Total comp is a far more realistic and accurate measurement.
sjg007|7 years ago
mushtar|7 years ago
shmerl|7 years ago
screye|7 years ago
These base estimates are much higher than what sites like Levels.fyi and anecdotal numbers I've collected from my new grad peers.
At the new grad level, Base salary numbers are $125-135k:Google, $105-115k:MSFT,Amazon,FB. The base salary numbers at other unicorns don't sound much different either.
I am not saying that TB's numbers are wrong. But, there has to be some reason for the huge difference in the numbers I've heard vs the ones TB reports.
pmalynin|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
trevor-e|7 years ago
joshuamorton|7 years ago
Are you going to refuse a job offer because it pays less than some arbitrary bar, even if it's the best offer you have?
grigjd3|7 years ago
cirenehc|7 years ago
seizethecheese|7 years ago
crowbahr|7 years ago
So you see 95% of those salaries are just MS/AMZ
S_A_P|7 years ago
cimmanom|7 years ago
Now, that’s for startups. Banks will pay twice that.
I’m wondering what the medians look like - the means being displayed may be distorted by the finance and Google outliers.
Edited to add: $60k is a middle class salary for a single person in NYC. (Though people who are unaccustomed to small apartment living / the idea of singles having roommates / the idea that middle class means having to compromise on some expenses will complain otherwise.) I wouldn’t want to try to raise a family of 4 here on that income, though.
$130k is definitely upper middle class for a single person, but a family of 4 on that income is going to have to live way outside the hip areas of the outer boroughs in order to be able to afford housing.
kilbuz|7 years ago
RandallBrown|7 years ago
DevX101|7 years ago
mratzloff|7 years ago
samjbobb|7 years ago
scarface74|7 years ago
The salaries just aren’t that impressive for the cities in question. I can make that in much lower cost of living areas of the country.
Apocryphon|7 years ago
themagician|7 years ago
bluedevilzn|7 years ago
munchbunny|7 years ago
I trust Triplebyte's data to be more representative because it's not one internet identity at a time stating their own number.
dilyevsky|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
friedman23|7 years ago
Given that the median in SF is $150K, $200k base salary for an experienced engineer is in line with expectations
chillacy|7 years ago
tsunamifury|7 years ago
dmode|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
dboreham|7 years ago
lsc|7 years ago
It seems like only comparing base makes it harder to compare smaller companies (which usually give you all your comp as base) with larger companies (where 30% seems to be rsu and bonus)
halis|7 years ago
freyir|7 years ago
jordache|7 years ago
dilyevsky|7 years ago
goobynight|7 years ago
unknown|7 years ago
[deleted]
nolawi89|7 years ago
ChicagoDave|7 years ago
povertyworld|7 years ago
leowoo91|7 years ago